Free Republic

On this date in 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev chopped to pieces in Moscow for sustaining a major insurrection whose effects would haunt Russia for decades to come. Pugachev’s Rebellion was the most spectacular specimen in populous family tree of 18th century peasant uprisings. Most such disturbances were local and fundamentally unthreatening. Pugachev’s was neither. The Cossack commander raised a revolt in the Urals in 1773, styling himself the long-lost tsar Catherine had overthrown a decade before. Catherine was slow to see the import, but this hinterlands pretender set up a state-like bureaucracy...

In 1850, 60-year-old Robert Newsom, a prosperous farmer, traveled forty miles from his home in Callaway County, Missouri to neighboring Audrain County to buy a slave. Newsom was the head of a large and complex household that included several of his grown children, grandchildren, and five enslaved boys and men. His wife had died a few years earlier, a consideration that may have influenced his decision to purchase a female slave, a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia. From the first day, Newsom treated Celia as his concubine. Testimony given before the Missouri Supreme Court in 1855 indicates that Newsom raped Celia...

We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children. We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Now, a grand jury is alleging that Dolan, 71, was behind at least some of the claims included in the dossier, according to a 39-page indictment obtained by John Durham, the special counsel probing the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. The indictment also suggests that Dolan, who worked on both Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns and on a State Department advisory board during the Clinton administration, was so partisan that any information he provided would be suspect. Dolan is left unidentified in the charges against Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who, the indictment claims, provided the core allegations included in...

A presenter on Russian state television has issued an apparent threat to "traitors" living in Britain. Kirill Kleymenov warned of the dangers of spying on Russia and advised those who betrayed their country: "Don't choose Britain as a place to live." The comments, made on Channel One's Vremya news programme on Wednesday evening, came amid speculation over who was behind the attempted murder of a double agent on British soil. "I don't wish death on anyone, but, purely for educational purposes, I have a warning for anyone who dreams of such a career," he reportedly said. "The profession of a...

China's troubled property sector suffered another blow this month when frustrated homebuyers stopped making mortgage payments on units in unfinished projects. The boycott came with many developers struggling to manage mountains of debt, and fears swirling that the crisis could spread to the rest of the Chinese -- and global -- economy. Colossal. Property and related industries are estimated to contribute as much as a quarter of China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector took off after market reforms in 1998. There was a breathtaking construction boom on the back of demand from a growing middle class that saw property...

Steve Schmidt, cofounder of the disgraced Lincoln Project and former presidential campaign manager for the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), admitted Friday that he did not actually vote for McCain in the 2008 election, won by Barack Obama.

Yevgeny Primakov, who led Russia's government as it emerged from its previous financial crisis 10 years ago, said a "state dictatorship" was required to ensure tens of billions of dollars flowed through banks to their intended recipients in industry. "Our biggest concern is that the thrombosis of credit lines and the rise in banks' rates is leading to falling production," said Primakov, chairman of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Trade, which unites and represents various Russian businesses. In an address to President Dmitry Medvedev at a Kremlin meeting attended by the heads of regional chambers, he said the rescue...

One of the most overlooked aspects of the year just ended is the vindication of Chief Justice John Roberts -- a vindication that showed up as the national catastrophe known as ObamaCare got rolling. Roberts may have also doomed Hillary Clinton's chance to live in the White House again. The chief justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush and reputedly a constitutionalist in his jurisprudence, set his diabolical trap (diabolical to Democrats) on June 28, 2012, when he joined with the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Conservatives and Republicans across the...

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that he was not “buying” former Gov. Sarah Palin’s political comeback bid for her state’s sole seat on the U.S. House of Representatives. Anchor Jon Karl said, “Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is attempting a political comeback nearly 14 years after Sen. John McCain made her the Republican Party’s first female candidate for vice president. She’s running for Alaska’s lone House seat following the death of longtime Congressman Don Young. Donald Trump has already endorsed her but does she have a shot at winning? Here’s FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.), who has accused Republicans of enabling Russia, took maximum campaign donations from a top lobbyist for Nord Stream 2 AG, the company behind an oil transportation project dubbed "Putin’s pipeline." Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, received $2,900 last year from Vincent Roberti Sr., the chairman of lobbying powerhouse Roberti Global. Roberti gave $5,400 to Swalwell’s campaign in 2018. Roberti Global received $2.4 million in 2021 from Nord Stream 2 AG, a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Russian oil giant Gazprom. Critics of the 761-mile pipeline have long said it would allow Vladimir Putin to...

A senior Russian Foreign Ministry official says that Moscow has a responsibility to protect ethnic Russian citizens of other countries, "regardless of where they live," and that "we will do everything possible to defend the rights and interests" of ethnic Russian minorities in the neighboring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The comments came from Anatoly Makarov, the director of the Foreign Ministry's Department for Interaction with Compatriots Abroad. He was speaking to the Russian outlet RuBaltic, as translated by Paul Goble. "We are carrying out a line so that Russian compatriots regardless of where they live are guaranteed...

When this story broke today that John Hynansky received a taxpayer funded $20 MILLION loan to build two luxury car dealerships and expand others in the Ukraine, Conservatives decried it and Media Matters bashed Conservatives. Media Matters says the loan by Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is not taxpayer funded. The truth is, it all depends on what the meaning of "self-funded" is. Photo: John Hynansky Hynansky is a close friend and contributor to Joe Biden's political adventurers as well as a contributor to Barack Obama, so a $20 MILLION loan with US taxpayer funding to be sent overseas, made a...

A convicted felon accused by the US government of supporting “the cause of violent jihad” — and promoting 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden — donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and a host of progressive Democrats following his release from prison, records show. Emadeddin Muntasser, 57, and two of his associates were convicted in January 2008 on counts of conspiring to defraud the United States government, lying to the FBI and engaging in a scheme to conceal evidence. The charges stemmed from their operation of an Islamic charity that acted as a front to finance Islamic jihad abroad and lying...

Well, well, well, roughly a quarter of the 2.2 billion dollars being spent on Obamaphones, has gone to a company owned by Carlos Slim. Todd Shields of Bloomberg reports: Slim's TracFone Wireless Inc. received about a quarter of the funds from the U.S. government's Lifeline program, according to the latest figures. Today, a House subcommitteeasked why the program, paid for by fees charged to U.S. phone subscribers, tripled in cost since 2008. How many other markets have grown 300% in the years since the crash? Slim is often called the richest man in the world, and owns the cell phone monopoly in Mexico,...

A U.S. intelligence report for the first time links China’s largest telecommunications company to Beijing’s KGB-like intelligence service and says the company recently received nearly a quarter-billion dollars from the Chinese government. The disclosures are a setback for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.’s efforts to break into the U.S. telecommunications market. The company has been blocked from doing so three times by the U.S. government because of concerns about its links to the Chinese government. The report by the CIA-based Open Source Center states that Huawei’s chairwoman, Sun Yafang, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Communications Department before joining...

Boy oh Boy the Democrats are such a fickle group. After his endorsement of Barack Obama they rushed to embrace Colin Powell. Flaunting the significance of the endorsement. Yet as recently as February 2007 prominent African American Democrats such as Al Sharpton were calling Powell Bush’s House Negro: Singer, Activist, and Democrat Harry Belafonte Agreed In an interview on San Diego radio station KFMB-AM last Tuesday, Belafonte compared Powell to a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner’s house and says only things that will please his master. “There’s an old saying,” Belafonte said in that interview. “In the...

Cybersecurity experts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland security contracts and high-level security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia and trigger an FBI investigation of him and his campaign, according to several sources familiar with the work of Special Counsel John Durham. Durham is investigating whether they were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive, nonpublic Internet data, which they had access to through their government contracts, to dredge up derogatory information on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign in 2016...

Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 50, was arrested by the FBI and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center at 4:53 p.m. Thursday. He's been wanted for 12 years, after he was indicted in 2006 on charges of arson, conspiracy and animal enterprise terrorism. In 2008, he was believed to have been living in Syria with family members, and federal officials announced a $50,000 reward for his arrest. (FBI) A fugitive sought for more than a decade and accused of taking part in a string of eco-sabotage attacks across the West is in custody in Portland and was to make his...

In the small hours after midnight on the night of July 16-17 90 years ago, the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, children, and four family retainers, were shot in a Yekaterinburg basement by their Bolshevik jailers. Doting family man, vacillating dictator, as weak and rich as Croesus … the doomed Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias was a man small of stature. His reign emerged under a bad star when 1,300 Muscovites were trampled to death in the crush for his coronation largesse; 18 years later, Nicholas‘s support for Serbia against Austria-Hungary was instrumental in pitching Europe into...